The physician-narrator ponders the symbolic significance of the tool that typifies his profession, the stethoscope. Through it he has heard "the sound of creation"--the sound of life to be born--and the absence of sound that signals death. Should he, therefore, treat the stethoscope as if it were a religious icon?"Never! Yet I could praise it." Were he to praise it, he would "celebrate my own ears" that can hear "Night cries / of injured creatures" and "the wind / traveling from where it began."

The physician-narrator examines a bigoted patient. As the patient maligns Welshmen, Jews, and liberals--all of which the doctor in fact is--the physician imagines prescribing deadly drugs. "Yet I prescribed for him / as if he were my brother." The encounter is not, however, over yet. The poem ends: "Later that night I must have slept / on my arm: momentarily / my right hand lost its cunning.".

A patient is dying of AIDS. The physician-speaker repositions a drain in the patient's wound, taking care "to slap on latex gloves" before he does so. Another physician, "a hypocrite / Across the room complains that it's her right / To walk away . . . ." She acknowledges no obligation as a physician to care for this patient. Does she think it is too risky? What kind of risk? Might contact with this dying man somehow upset her ordered world and expose her vulnerability? Of course, nothing she could do "Could save him now." Even the physician-speaker must leave the patient "pleading" and continue with his other work: "There's too much to do."

In the first part of this four part poem, the medical student climbs “stone-murky steps” to the Dissecting Room, as London is being bombed during World War II. In the second part, the student asks his cadaver, “Who are you?” Probing deeply, cutting the meat, the student concludes that the cadaver was never really a person, the right hand “never held, surely, another hand in greeting / or tenderness . . . . ” In the next part it becomes clear that because of the student’s flip attitude, he hadn’t been invited by the hospital priest to the memorial service for cadavers.Finally, the speaker (now for many years a physician) reflects again on his old question about the cadaver’s identity. He realizes that the cadaver’s name is the name on every gravestone, that his figure is the figure on every human portrait, “always in disguise.” At the end, the physician goes on with his daily activities, climbing the stairs to his bedroom and winding his clock.

Luke Lewis is the son of an itinerant preacher in Upper Canada
and a recent medical graduate of Montreal’s McGill University. In 1851, he
joins the practice of the aging, Edinburgh-trained Dr. Stewart Christie in
Thornhill, Ontario. It is a small village a few miles north of Toronto (now the
site of some of the most expensive property in Canada). Christie is tired
and leaves Luke alone to work.

Luke hopes to consolidate his learning and earn enough to set up on his own
elsewhere in Ontario, closer to his farming brothers. He rents a couple of rooms
from the doctor and is able to accommodate his father Thaddeus Lewis on his
occasional visits.

Morgan Spicer, the custodian of the local Strangers’ Burying Ground, is an old
friend of the family. He finds a grave disturbed, which raises the specter of
grave-robbing, an all too common crime much abetted by medical schools. But in
this case, the corpse is left behind and the grave was not fresh. Morgan is
baffled but the police are indifferent. When it happens a second time, Luke and
his father try to help solve the mystery. They wonder if Dr. Christie might be
behind it. What does he do all day?

Luke is lonely and he sorely misses his friend and lover, Ben, who died of
tuberculosis back in Montreal. Luke has managed to keep his sexual orientation
firmly in the closet, knowing it would be the end of his career and of his
relationship with his beloved father.

However, Luke’s gallant actions in rescuing the beautiful African, Cherub, from
American slave-traders, result in an unwanted invitation from a somewhat too
grateful society lady, Lavinia. Through her, he meets the clever Perry Biddulph
and is plunged into a torment of attraction and despair, compounded by the fact
that Lavinia’s husband is a scoundrel whom the Lewis’s have met before in the
previous novel.

Luke firmly resolves to avoid both Lavinia and Perry, but she uses his sexual
secret to blackmail him into finding the means to leave her husband. Most
problems are nicely resolved in the end. To say more would spoil it.

Born in 1921 to Jewish immigrant parents, “Barney” Barnett
describes his life in medicine and education, from his earliest love of science
and learning through his medical and residency education in general internal
medicine, his success as an academic physician, and finally his judicious
decision to retire.

An important leitmotiv is the antisemitism of the University of Toronto that
kept him from a residency position (he went to Minneapolis) and a staff
position (he was offered a one-year fellowship on a low salary in 1951).
Even after he was accepted as a staff member at the Toronto General
Hospital (TGH), he was not promoted. Although he referred many patients to his
TGH colleagues, only six ever returned the favor in the thirteen years he was
there. Ironically, his Jewish background plucked him from this pedestrian
position directly to the seat of Physician in Chief of Toronto’s Mount Sinai
hospital (founded 1922) when finally it became a teaching hospital in
1964.

While maintaining a practice in internal medicine, Berris became a liver
specialist and researcher who introduced liver biopsy to Toronto. Known as a
consummate diagnostician, he endeavored to enhance the research profile of his
institution, integrating it with bedside instruction. He served on examining
committees for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, candidly
describing the subjectivity of the process. He also served on many committees
of the College of Physicians of Ontario, including discipline, and describes the process used to investigate complaints with
case examples.

His story includes vivid descriptions of some of the most famous figures in
Canadian medical history, his teachers and colleagues – J.B. Grant, Arthur W.
Ham, William Boyd, Ray Farquharson, K.J.R.Wightman, Arthur Squires, and Arnold
Aberman. He was once involved with the care of the wife of David Ben-Gurion and
Queen Elizabeth II.

Little is told of his personal life, although he admits that he often neglected
his family for the press of work. His first wife, Marie, was a social worker;
they had three children, one now a physician. She died of ovarian cancer; to
care for her, he stepped down as chief in 1977. In 1984, he married
Thelma Rosen, an expert in education and widow of a pediatrician colleague.
Together they went on a year’s sabbatical that allowed him to work in
Singapore, Stanford University, and Sheila Sherlock’s lab at the Royal Free
Hospital in London.

Some of the most engaging chapters contain clinical vignettes: stories about
patients, the diagnostic workup, and their outcomes. Like Richard
Goldbloom (A
Lucky Life) and without diminishing his native abilities (which must have
been considerable), he modestly attributes most of his success to
luck.

In 1965, Dr Fingal Flaherty O’Reilly is traveling in his car
with nurse Kitty when they come across a road accident and stop to help. The
incident leads to reminiscing about his final years of medical training in
Dublin hospitals in the 1930s.

Fingal has just returned from a stint in the navy. His student cohort includes
a steady chum, a respected, brilliant woman, and a narcissistic pest–-all
rather familiar tropes, comfortably portrayed. A picture of a hospital-based
education emerges through teachers both kindly and rigid, a crusty head nurse
who turns out to be a good soul, and a lovely student nurse, Kitty. Fingal’s
professorial father disapproves of his son’s choice of a medical career and on his
infrequent visits home, their relationship is tense.

Attractive to medical student readers are the clinical stories, the diagnostic
dilemmas, and the stress of examinations. Social factors, such as poverty,
unemployment, and discrimination, are intimately connected to the health of
Fingal’s patients both as causes and results. His concern for his patients and
those aspects of their lives earn him the respect of the head nurse and her student.

This story set in two time periods is partly a prequel to some of Taylor’s other
tales, such as An
Irish Country Doctor.

Matthew McCarthy begins his memoir of medicine internship
year at Columbia University with a glimpse into his first rotation, surgery, as
a Harvard medical student. He had exhibited a talent for surgery and liked it
– an affinity compatible with his dexterity as a minor league baseball player
and sense of team spirit. The reader meets some of McCarthy’s memorable
mentors, and, although he opts to not pursue surgery as a career, McCarthy’s
eye for seeking productive apprenticeships with talented housestaff and faculty
allow him to guide the reader through a year of drinking from the firehose,
also known as internship. Medical training is full of liminal experiences, and
internship is one the most powerful and transformative.

McCarthy’s eagerness to do well, both by his patients and by
his medical colleagues and team, and his candor with revealing his mental and
bodily responses to the stress and strain of the responsibilities of
internship, make him an adept guide. For example, he has gulped an iced coffee
and is churning at the bit to take care of a new admission on his first day of
call in the cardiac care unit (CCU). His resident, called Baio in the book,
tries to tell McCarthy to take it easy. But McCarthy notes, “Our orientation
leaders, a peppy group of second- and third year residents, had instructed us
to exude a demented degree of enthusiasm at all times, which wasn’t difficult
now that my blood was more caffeine than hemoglobin.” (p 15) The previous
chapter had ended with a cliffhanger – a patient life would be placed in danger
because neophyte McCarthy misses the importance of a key clinical finding –
what and how that plays out will wait until McCarthy guides us through the
terror and exhilaration he feels as he begins his CCU rotation.
McCarthy has a good sense of the ironic: the huge banner
advertising the hospital reads “Amazing Things are Happening Here!” Indeed, not
only for patients and families, but also for the many trainees and workers. We
watch McCarthy successfully perform his first needle decompression of a
pneumothorax; he is allowed to attempt it as he notes that he watched the video
of the procedure. But unlike the video, he needs to readjust the needle several
times and add on some additional tubing and water trap, which makes the
scenario more true-to-life than a fictionalized ‘save.’ The author ends the
chapter with congratulations from resident Baio: “Well done… Amazing things are
indeed happening here.” (p 244) As McCarthy’s year continues, many things do
happen, including an infected needle stick, telling bad news to a new widow,
and developing a friendship with a longterm hospital patient waiting for a
heart transplant.

A bicycling, bee-keeping, British neurosurgeon approaching the end of his professional career recalls some distinctive patients, surgical triumphs as well as notable failures, difficult decisions, and mistakes. Nearly thirty years of a busy neurosurgical practice are distilled into a collection of linked stories throbbing with drama - both the flamboyant kind and the softly simmering type.

Most chapters are titled after a medical condition (exceptions are "Hubris" and "Melodrama"). Some of the headings are familiar - Trauma, Infarct, Aneurysm, Meningioma. Other chapter titles flaunt delicious medical terminology that mingles the mysterious and the poetic with nomenclature such as Angor animi, Neurotmesis, Photopsia, and Anaesthesia dolorosa.

Included are riveting accounts of both mundane and seemingly miraculous patient outcomes. One success story involves a pregnant woman losing her sight due to a brain tumor that compresses the optic nerves. Her vision is restored with an operation performed by the author. Her baby is born healthy too. But tales of failure and loss - malignant glioblastomas that are invulnerable to any treatment, operative calamities including bleeding of the brain, paralysis, and stroke - are tragically common. The author describes his humanitarian work in the Ukraine. He admits his aggravation with hospital bureaucracy and is frequently frustrated by England's National Health Service.

Sometimes the shoe falls on the other foot, and the doctor learns what it is to be a patient. He suffers a retinal detachment. He falls down some stairs and fractures his leg. His mother succumbs to metastatic breast cancer. His three month old son requires surgery for a benign brain tumor.

As his career winds down, the author grows increasingly philosophical. He acknowledges his diminishing professional detachment, his fading fear of failure, and his less-hardened self. He becomes a sort of vessel for patients to empty their misery into. He is cognizant of the painful privilege it is to be a doctor.

The
Bad Doctor is a graphic novel describing the daily life of Dr. Iwan James,
a general practitioner in a small Welsh town. At the time of the story, Dr.
James is an established, middle-aged physician, with a wife and two grown sons.
Initially it appears that despite his outward success, Dr. James is simply
dissatisfied with his life and career – with his early marriage, with his
overbearing colleague, and with his patients, who come to him with all sorts of
ailments, from silly to tragic to creepy. However, the readers learn that Dr.
James is also struggling mentally with himself. Through flashbacks to his
childhood and his medical school years, and through his clinical interactions
with a patient suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, it is revealed
that Dr. James has also wrestled with this disorder since childhood. In between
composedly caring for all of his patients, releasing his frustrations on long
bike rides through the Welsh hills, and sharing his concerns with friends, he
learns to understand his compulsions and confront his own sense of inadequacy.

The author, Dr. Ian Williams, has in fact worked
in a rural general practice in Wales. Although this novel is a work of fiction,
and “any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is
purely coincidental” (pg. 2), the story is naturally and richly informed by his
personal experiences.